Why the Sysadmin Hates Your Software

Session Audio

Excerpt

You've worked really hard on your software. It's stable and has lots of nice features and users love it. But your sysadmin hates it and complains about how hard it is to install, configure, and manage. What's up with that?

Description

Managing software is one of the many responsibilities of the system administrator, and not just “server” software like web applications or network servers, but often end-user application software as well. Software packages sometimes make their installation and management a lot harder by thwarting the techniques sysadmins use for large-scale software management. Besides describing ways that software can be hard to manage, I’ll discuss the techniques that sysadmins use to do large-scale software management and make constructive recommendations for how to improve software manageability.

Sessions

You’ve worked really hard on your software. It’s stable and has lots of nice features and users love it. But your sysadmin hates it and complains about how hard it is to install, configure, and manage. What’s up with that?